New York Sour

Bourbon, lemon, sugar, and a red wine float — Wondrich traced this to 1880s Chicago despite its New York name, the wine adding tannin and dark fruit to the sour.

The New York Sour is a Whiskey Sour with a red wine float — a thin layer of light-bodied red wine poured over the back of a bar spoon to rest on the surface of the drink — that creates a striking two-layer visual and a secondary flavor dimension. The drink's origin is better placed in Chicago than New York despite its name: cocktail historian David Wondrich has traced versions of the red-wine-floated whiskey sour to Chicago in the 1880s, where it appeared under names including the Continental Sour and the Southern Whiskey Sour before acquiring its more famous geographic association. The Gilded Age hotel bars and club rooms of both cities served elaborate sour variations, and the red wine float was a fashionable embellishment that added visual drama to an otherwise straightforward category. Prohibition disrupted the drink's continuity and it largely disappeared from bar menus through the mid-20th century. The craft cocktail revival of the 2000s recovered it: the combination of bourbon's vanilla and grain character, lemon's acid, sugar's sweetness, and the tannin and dark fruit of the wine float — typically a Malbec, Merlot, or Beaujolais chosen for fruit-forward character and light tannins — proved genuinely elegant to a generation of bartenders rediscovering 19th-century American cocktail formats. It is now one of the most recognized whiskey cocktail variations.